Leisure: A New dimension to living;

Page 1

By Farrell and Wilbur Cross
"Work, we know, may make a man
stoop-shouldered or rich. It may even
ennoble him. Leisure perfects him. In
this lies its future."
SEBASTIAN DE GRAZIA*
A young executive from a brokerage
house designs stage sets for one of
the summer theatres near his home.
A life insurance agent wades for
hours with his sons in icy streams,
panning for gold and bringing home
the real thing. A bank officer
sculptures bushes for his neighbors
and performs expert surgery on trees
when required. An engineer
reconstructs the history of his
town and neighborhood. And a lady
author conducts travelers on guided
tours of the landmarks in her county.
What do these people have in
common?
The answer is that they are all part
of the steadily increasing number
of imaginative citizens with more and
more leisure time on their hands who
are seeking out and finding ingenious
and constructive ways of using their
hours, days and weeks of freedom.
The trend toward new activities for
off-duty and non-school time is now
touching the lives and outlooks of
people of all ages, in all income
brackets and in all regions of the
United States, and to a considerable
extent abroad.
As you consider the time you put
into reading about new developments
in accounting, into your own
professional development and into
intensive seasonal periods of work,
you might well ask where is all this
leisure that is supposedly being
passed around. But the trend is steady
and continuing, as was pointed out
in a recent article in U.S. News &
World Report, headlined "Leisure
Boom: Biggest Ever and Still
Growing." Discussing more time
available to people in all kinds of
careers, the article cited a number
of contributory factors such as our
new three-day weekends, longer
vacations, the trend towards the
four-day work week and the increasing
*Author, educator and political scientist